With the advent of the Internet large bandwidth availability, streaming media has become a very common technique for the delivery of media. The delivery of streaming media includes for example, webcasting, the display of video data, and various on-line television and sports broadcasting. Such audio/video (AV) streaming is much more convenient than traditional media delivery methods and also offers flexibility to end-users, which assists providers and multimedia companies in significantly reducing overall delivery costs.
Real time streaming protocol (RTSP) can be utilized to control the streaming of media data. RTSP technology utilizes a packet of information for the delivery of media streams to the end-user. RTSP also facilitates remote control access and allows time-based file access to a streaming server by buffering the packaged data to media players. Streamed media can be additionally configured with real-time captioning (RTC), which converts spoken language (e.g., English, Spanish, etc) from the streaming media to a readable format (e.g., somewhat similar to a court stenography process).
Real-time captioning is a method of captioning in which captions are simultaneously prepared and transmitted at the time of origination by specially trained real-time captioners utilizing a stenotype machine. The stenotype machine can be connected to a computer associated with software that translates stenographic shorthand into words in caption formats and standard spellings. RTC also facilitates communication for a person who prefers reading rather than listening by capturing the audio portion into a text log and maintains the history, and makes the media accessible to aid people with hearing disabilities.
Similarly, RTC can be widely utilized on television and classrooms environments, and has gained tremendous popularity with respect to streaming media. RTC also has the capability of providing real-time captions over web-based multimedia; however it is very difficult to deliver real-time multimedia with proper synchronization. Caption delivery systems can also be utilized to provide captions for non-web-based technologies such as radio, television, video conferencing, etc, which ensures accessibility to all forms of live, real-time multimedia.
The majority of existing captioning systems utilize some form of a writer's transcript for displaying text on a screen for a user. Currently, the text from the writer's transcript is not capable of being properly synchronized with the AV data, so current captioning systems have been explored, which utilize simple makeup language (SML) files or standard text files to display captions on a line-by-line basis. Such approaches are known as “back-end” replays, which do not combine text captioning in the media streaming process. Hence, current captioning systems do not possess capabilities to support real-time AV and text streaming over web-based multimedia networks. Although, many popular text-streaming techniques can be implemented in pure HTML, however, they do not deliver the textual data with the media streaming data. Moreover, alternative methods are also available for streaming the AV data and the textual data, but these techniques utilize two different time intervals for performing video/audio and text streaming.
Based on the foregoing it is believed that a need exists for an improved software application or service, which allows AV data streaming to be synchronized with text streaming to thereby provide live captioning, as disclosed in greater detail herein.